Bring Back the Natives

Since last writing, I went on the wonderful East Bay Bring Back the Natives Garden Tour and checked out amazing private gardens committed to California native flowers and shrubs. I found my favorite flower in my favorite garden: the hummingbird sage found in a Berkeley garden cultivated by a mom of two pre-schoolers. The hummingbird sage has a deep purple flower that's sticky to touch and smells sweet, almost like a shrub you find in the Sierra nicknamed Mountain Misery because of its sticky resin. (An old boyfriend nicknamed Mountain Man Dan, a former wildlife technician in Yosemite said Mountain Misery got its name from miners who thought the smell reminded them of their wives back home.) Well, the hummingbird sage attracts humming brids of course, likes shade and has what I am beginning to see as an the exotica of the native plant. Natives just don't look like show pieces in the gladiola, impatiens, pansy, peony tradition. Maybe because they haven't been cultivated for market, maybe because they are what landed here and just evolved on their own without targeted human tinkering. I don't want to totally belittled my beloved peonies-- we had a huge bed of over 50 gorgeous multi-colored peonies in my mom's garden growing up in Rochester, New York. But, I like the way natives are mostly drought resistant, they draw local birds and insects and they help us chart recent eco-history. When a good bunch get scorched in the summer or die off in the winter frost maybe they're telling us something.

When we bought our house in 2005, I inherited a garden thoughtfully created using natural gardening techniques and unknowingly let my husband make destroy it this year. I didn't realize I had such a cool garden until I took the Bring Back the Natives tour. In fact, I used to dis it and talk of the plants I inherited as wimp plants that lacked the beauty of a really lush garden. So it was easy for my husband to convince me that we needed more lawn. We pulled up a big rectangle of bricks that served as a small pond the winter of 2006 when winter storms flooded our backhouse the night I went into labor. Last summer, the new dad ripped up the vegetable garden and put in a french drain thus making a foot wide ten foot long underground pipe that sucks water and makes anything planted above it completely compromised. We also lawned over the bed of year-round rainbow chard and made raised beds when we found our soil had left over lead from the residue of the years when gasoline was laced with lead. We craiglisted our recycled concrete stepping stones and bought new commercial granite stones from god knows where and lawned over a path formerly made of the recycled concrete.

Why this confession? Everything our garden had been followed practices of natural gardening techniques: native plants that naturally thrive in the San Franciso Bay Area, control of weeds and water conservation with mulch, water conservation by selecting hardy, local native plants and by removing part or all of your lawn, inclusion of berry bushes and water sources for wildlife. Now we have a lot of lawn for our 14 month old son to roll around in, but he doesn't actually use the lawn. He likes to dig and pick strawberries (ripe or otherwise) and check out the birds and insects that fortunately still visit. Which leads me to wonder: what is with adult men and their lawns? Perhaps the wielding the lawn mower is such a right of passage for boys (and a trick right of passage because dads hype it up just so they can pass off the chore to someone else!) that they never quite get over it. Lawns are necessary thereafter in order to feel like a dad and a property owner. I like our new lawn but I was far more impressed with gardens I visited on the tour that had an amazing diversity of native plants, none of which required regular water and electric lawn mowers. Jacks at one surveys his domain confidently, a sight more interesting than the mower. It consists of eye-level lamb's ear stalks, roses, an immense lavender bush, cabbage plants that draw the cabbage moths, current bushes, idahoe fescue, firecracker and pineapple sage that inspire intimate encounters with hummingbirds and the lemon trees still small enough for Jacks to pull off leaves (which, by the way, we discovered yesterday also smell of lemons.)